Like a pop fly in center field, attendance at Citi Field has risen nearly 18 percent since last year. And television viewership has increased 62 percent on the Mets channel while sales of merchandise is up by 140 percent this year.

“You can feel more energy for sure,” said Seth Berkman, who writes about sports for The Times.

Even when the team is losing, like on Monday night, he said, “there’s still a liveliness to the crowd.” (The Mets did come back to win 4-3.)

Mr. Berkman said that fans are particularly excited by the outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, who since joining the team in July has helped turn the season around. Last night he hit his 35th home run this season.

Mr. Cespedes often wears neon green sleeves under his jersey, and fans have been doing the same, Mr. Berkman said.

Though the Amazins couldn’t extend their streak to last night’s game, falling to the Marlins, 9-3, the division leaders are still charging ahead towards the playoffs.

The true test of the city’s loyalties will come this weekend when the Mets face the Yankees for the first time since April, when the Yankees took two of the series’ three games.

The Museum of Modern Art just opened a new exhibition of Pablo Picasso sculptures.

About 140 sculptures were loaned to the museum from around the world, many of which haven’t been in the same place since they were created.

In her review of the show, Roberta Smith, an art critic for The Times, wrote that the exhibition is one of few shows that are “tantamount to works of art in their own right — for their clarity, lyricism and accumulative wisdom.”

Paintings like “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” and “Guernica” established Picasso as an artistic and cultural revolution unto himself, but Ms. Smith writes that “this exhibition raises the question of whether Picasso was a better sculptor or painter.”

You’ll just have to decide for yourself.

“Picasso Sculpture” runs through Feb. 7 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. [Included with admission]